African Writers Conference

On 1 June 1962 a conference of African literature in the English language, the first African Writers Conference, was held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Officially called a "Conference of African Writers of English Expression", it was attended by many prominent African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka (later Nobel Laureate in Literature), John Pepper Clark, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (then known as James Ngugi), Ezekiel Mphahlele, Robert Serumaga, Rajat Neogy (founder of Transition Magazine). The conference was "not only the very first major international gathering of writers and critics of African literature on the African continent; it was also held at the very cusp of political independence for most African countries."

The conference dealt with the issue of how the legacy of colonialism had left the African writer with a dilemma with regard to the language choice in writing. The questions raised and debated at the conference were:

At the conference, several nationalist writers refused to acknowledge any literature written in non-African languages as being African literature. Ngũgĩ noted the irony of the conference's title, in that it excluded a great part of the population that did not write in English, while trying to define African literature but accepting that it must be in English. As he would describe it in his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature: "The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation."

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